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PHOTO BY GKEG BRAMHALL
the emergence of the new left
In the spring of 1968, thousands of students
in New York's Columbia University erected barricades
and battled police following a successful four-week
strike against University complicity in the Vietnam War
and racist expansion programs in nearby Harlem.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of French
workers and students — after seizing factories, schools,
and streets — nearly toppled the DeGauUe government^
Significantly, the mass revolt grew out of studehf
protests against the policies of the first Frencll,
"multiversity* at Nanterre. In West Germany student
strikes and demonstrations iayolving thousands were
directei^ \ ai^inst the Government's passage of
"emergency i laws* giving near- dictatorial powers
2 to itself: In Japan, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries,
similar actions have been occurring as well. ^
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If The identifiable thread running through these internationally dramatic
events is an assortment of radical student organizations. These groups
make up the core of what has come to be known as the New Left. Although
they have only been visible to the general public for the past two or three
years, most of these organizations first formed in the late 1950s and
early 1960s. Generally, they are made up of students and unaffiliated
I young people within those advanced capitalist countries with highly
developed technological societies.
The post- World War II rapid transformation of these economies
had a similar effect on their systems of higher education — the growth of
the "knowledge factories" or multiversities. With the dominant social
themes of this period being affluence, consumption, and adjustment,
the young men and women were expressing their cultural oppression
and personal alienation with growing intensity. Out of apathy and the
gray flannel suit emerged James Dean, Marlon Brando, and the Angry
Young Man — the Beat Generation. Also, following the Hungarian Revolt
crushed by the Soviets in 1956, hundreds of young intellectuals left the
European and US Communist Parties in disgust over the crimes of Stalin.
All this, to be sure, was only an vindercurrent, a minor key. In the
mainstream was the Cold War, Joe McCarthy, the silent generation
filing into heavily- mortgaged Ozzie and Harriet suburbia, the prototypes
of Carl Oglesby's man of those times — slim-waisted, swivel- hipped,
bullet-headed make-out artists. While many young activists of today
may find these images rather alien, this is where the history of the
New Left begins. These were the conditions giving birth to our present
movement.
the growth of sds
The central force of the New Left in the United States has been
Students for a Democratic Society or SDS. We are a young, rapidly
growing movement; only sixty- odd people attended our founding
convention at Port Huron, Michigan in 1961. Even by early 1965, SDS
had fewer than twenty- five hundred members with chapters on less than
^J/. forty campuses. However, with its April 17th, 1965 March on Washington
to End the War in Vietnanij SPS grew in national prominence. Presently,
there are over forty thousand national and local SDS activists in more
than three hundred chapters in universities across the country.
In the early years, SDS was a coalition of liberals and radicals,
working from a multi-issue aerspective dn^^^
* disarmament, civil rights, potetty, ana university i-eform. We supported
^ reform Democrja-tic elefctoral campaigns, and in 1964 even ^t out a button
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saying "Part of the Way with LBJ".
Our bitter yet powerful experience with American politics in the
1960s has moved us considerably away from our original Left- liberal
stance. Today SDS is a mass radical and anti- imperialist student
movement. The critique we are developing of American corporate
capitalism has brought us to advocate the necessity of an activist and
revolutionary politics for the New Left,
where do we stand?
ON VIETNAM AND US FOREIGN POLICY
SDS completely opposes the US Government's immoral, illegal,
and genocidal war against the people of Vietnam. We insist on the
immediate withdrawal of all US personnel from that country. Moreover,
we see the US policy in Vietnam as part of a global strategy for containinf
revolutionary change in the "Third World" nations of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. Rather than the result of an essentially good government's
mistaken decisions, we see the world-wide exploitation and oppression
of those insurgent peoples as the logical conclusion of the giant US
corporations' expanding and necessary search for higher profits and
strategic resource^.. That f^steim is wst properly named imperialism,
and we stand by and suppoj^all those' Mo struggle against its onslaugit.
They are our brothers and sisters, giot our enemies.
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ON THE DRAFT AND THE MILITARY
SDS demands the abolition of the Selective Service
System. We see the Draft as racist and anti- democratic,
procuring manpower for aggressive wars abroad.
Moreover, through the "deferment" system, the primary
coercive function of the Draft is "channeling* the lives
of millions of young people outside the Military into
lifelong vocations deemed "essential* by corporate
military elites rather than freely chosen by themselves.
We urge and will organize all young men to wage a
collective struggle in resistance to the Draft by refusing
to serve in the Military. We also seek to break the
barriers placed between us and our brothers in uniform.
When forced by threat of imprisonment or exile, some
of us will organize within the Armed Forces, advocating
desertion and other forms of resistance to US foreign
policy.
ON THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT
SDS has long and actively supported the struggle
of black Americans for freedom and self-determination.
Racism and exploitation confront black people as a
group, together as a people. From thi$ given condition
of their daily lives, black people niust act as a group
in establishing their common ide^ti^, and in planning
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a strategy to challenge their oppression. We do not simply "tolerate"
the growth of black consciousness, we encourage it. Criticizing "black
power* as "racism in reverse* is as mistaken as denouncing the
American Revolution of 1776 as "colonialism in reverse". In addition to
k confronting all aspects of institutionalized racism in American life,
we strongly believe that the strongest supjwrt we can afford the black
movement comes from our efforts to engage exploited whites in the
struggles and values of radical politics^
ON LABOR AND THE STRUGGLES OF WORKING PEOPLE
From its beginnings, SDS has recognized the crucial role that the
working class has to fulfill in any movement for radical social change.
More recently, we have rejected the false notion that most Americans
are "middle-class*. Considering professional, service, white-collar,
and university-trained technical workers as a "class* separate from
blue- collar industrial workers serves only to confuse and divide millions
of workers and students and prevent them from realizing the corporate
capitalist source of their exploitation and their common interest in uniting
against its oppression. To further the unity and radical consciousness
of the working class as a whole we support the rank-and-file insurgencies
of working people against their employers, the Government, and corrupt
union leadership. Our concern is not only the improvement of wages
and working conditions for our brothers and sisters in the shops, but for
a transformation of all labor issues growing out of alienation and lack of
control into a movement against the capitalist system itself.
ON THE STUDENT REVOLT
SDS views the multiversity as a knowledge factory, a kind of service
station producing skilled manpower and intelligence for integration with
the marketable needs of the major coriwrate, government, and military
institutions. Neither the content of the educational process, nor the ends
to which our learning and resources are directed, further the fulfillment
of humane social needs, father, the "knowledge commodity* (ourselves
and the results of our work) is shaped to further the production of waste,
social oppression, ; and military destruction. The recognition of this
process has been the driving force in our work to transform student
"alienation* into a radicsU force reaching out and uniting with
Constituencies beyond the campus in struggles against oppressive
university administrations.
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from moral outrage to radical vision
The New Left has not been noted for the completeness or coherence
of its analysis or strategy for change. Within the ranks of SDS exists
a variety of political positions: socialists, anarchists, communists, and
humanist liberals. Nonetheless, the interplay of these ideas with
a common commitment to action has produced a rich and powerful shared
political experience emerging from an on- going struggle. We have looked
primarily to that experience as the source and test of political truth,
rather than to this or that dogmatic catechism. While not shunning
analytical work, we have always seen this focus as a basis of our strength
and authenticity.
Whatever the degree of the New Left's diversity, however, we have
always asserted a common clarity in our values. Within our vision, all
authentically revolutionary movements are seen as first, last, and always
movements for human freedom, whatever form their demands may take
in a given historic period. The New Left radical consciousness began
with the perception of a gap between the actual reality of our daily lives
and the accessible potentiality for human fulfillment already in existence.
This tension — the contradiction between what is and what can be — first
futilely sought its resolution in a quest for personal salvation.
When the interests of the dominant social order denied the
realization of that potential, we discovered our powerlessness, our
unfreedom. Moreover, the social character of our oppression revealed
the need of a collective struggle for liberation. We discovered our deepest
personal hopes and desires were the widely-held aspirations of many.
That discovery has led to our affirmation of a common humanity with
all of the oppressed.
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At present, the contradiction between the brutal and dehumanized
reality of advanced corporate capitalism and the liberating potential
of its technology and productive organization has never been greater.
Planned obsolescence and waste production increase in the midst oi*
growing scarcity. Fragmented job specialization and meaningless toil
expand; while cybernation and automation contain the possibility of total
job integration, the abolition of alienated labor, and the vast expansion
of free and creative activity. From this viewpoint, all the world's people
have never been more oppressed. At this moment of history, on the other
hand, the potential of the struggle for l^iman fulfillment has never been
- greater. The New Left will be at ifie center oit^at struggle. Our humanity
' is at stake. Join us.
SU BSCR IBS TO
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find what sds is about
learn our plans for the future
read the ongoing debates inside the organization i j
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write to new left notes - sds
1608 W, Madison St.
Chicago, 111. 60612
JOIN US
sds
students for a democratic society
1608 West Madison, Chicago 60612 (312-666-3874)
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